Strategic business planning is an area where the most pressure is often put on the strategic planning process and the people developing the plan, but this does not mean that results are any better. Because top executives typically drive the strategic business planning process, the employees under them must participate whether they like it or not. They are getting paid to participate. The result is often that people’s natural energies, interests and passions are cut off or suppressed in the strategic business planning process, and implementation suffers accordingly.
Dynamic Strategic Planning was developed in part to correct this huge, debilitating deficiency. You can make people do things they don’t want to do, for fear of losing their jobs, but you cannot make them care about things they don’t care about.
In one of the earliest applications of Dynamic Strategic Planning to strategic business planning, we worked with a company which manufactures and assembles products for major retailers like Wal-Mart and Kmart. They were under great pressure to reduce costs and come up with new product ideas at the same time. They had recently been through a long, expensive traditional strategic planning process and were disappointed and frustrated with the results.
We formed teams of people around issues and initiatives they cared about. This meant for example that an administrative assistant from another department served on the marketing team, an area she had always been interested in but kept out of because of her job title. In no time at all, people were buzzing with excitement. “This is the best thing that we have ever done,” one said. “The energy level here is tremendous,” another said. And a third commented, “We have come up with more innovative product ideas in the past two months than we did in the past two years.”
This illustration shows vividly how strategic business planning can benefit tremendously from the Dynamic Strategic Planning process. DSP is much more powerful, much more energizing, and much more realistic than the old way of planning. A business is all about people. It is not a machine. In the 21st Century, creativity and innovation are the keys to competitive advantage, and nothing unleashes that better than Dynamic Strategic Planning.
So if you’re involved with strategic planning for your business, you owe it to yourself to get your own copy of Dynamic Strategic Planning: A Powerful Process For Real-World Results, right now. Follow its steps and you’ll see real-world results as never before. Click here to get your copy now.